Cover Reveal: The Memory Witch by Heather Topham Wood

Ten years ago, Quinn Jacobs’ mother made a bargain with a local witch—steal away Quinn’s memories from the first eight years of her life and in return, Quinn would spend a year in servitude to the witch.

On Quinn’s eighteenth birthday, she’s forced to leave her home and friends behind. For the next year, she’ll live at the Chadwick House, learning everything she needs to know about being a spellcaster. As her powers grow, Quinn begins to unravel the secrets of the past and the reason her mother was so desperate to conceal the horrifying truth.

Publication Date: December 15, 2013

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Excerpt:

I didn’t have a single remembrance before the age of eight. The first day of kindergarten, losing my first tooth, my first best friend—these memories vanished into an unexplained chasm and were still missing ten years later.

My mother would never explain the root of this anomaly to me. The only thing she’d say is that losing my father that year did something irreversible to my brain. A crater opened up inside of me and every early memory fell into oblivion.

I had eight years with my father before he died—but I didn’t have one memory of him. I didn’t know what it felt like to be inside of his embrace. I had no recollection of the scent I breathed in when he gathered me up into his arms. I had to imagine the memories through a haphazard collage of photographs and videos left behind.

My father was murdered in a fumbled burglary attempt at our home. My mother told me I should be grateful we weren’t home that night because we would be six feet under right alongside him. The ice in her voice made me wonder if she blamed him in some way for being killed.

Mere weeks after we laid him to rest, we moved two hours away from our New Jersey hometown to Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. A visit to his final resting place was a rare occurrence and we were estranged from my father’s side of the family. The part that I always had a hard time wrapping my head around was that my father’s unsolved murder never plagued my mother. She never sought out the killer to exact justice for taking a father away from his young daughter.

She insisted we needed a fresh start. And for ten years, I lived a seemingly normal teenage existence with the exception of my unique case of amnesia. My mother never brought me to a team of doctors to analyze my brain and she has never pushed me to remember. I comprehended the oddities surrounding my life, but we’d lived this way for so long that it became normal.

Until the day that everything changed.